Clarkesworld #227, August 2025

“A Shaky Bridge” by Marissa Lingen

“Sleeper” by R. T. Ester

“Sea of Fertility” by Bella Han

“A Dream of Twin Sunsets” by Ryan Cole

“And The Planet Loved Him” by L Chan

“Memories Are Only Valuable If They Can Be Lost” by AI Jiang

“Heart of Thunder” by Raahem Alvi

“Vwoom!” by Uchechukwu Nwaka

Reviewed by Francine Taylor

In “A Shaky Bridge” by Marissa Lingen, Casey’s father achieves a remarkable recovery from a debilitating stroke due to a “neural bridge implant.” But the miracle has a hidden cost. He blurts out unexpected praise for the company that manufactures the implant, and afterwards he has little memory of what he said. It becomes obvious to the whole family that the neural equivalent of ‘ads’ are being spliced into Casey’s father’s neural pathways.

I found the premise both realistic and improbable —realistic in that companies will, of course, seize any opportunity to hawk their products. However, it stretches credulity to think that the company would expect people not to notice. The resolution was mildly satisfying yet entirely predictable, and I was disappointed that the main character played no role in it. Still, I enjoyed the realistic characterizations, and I look forward to reading more by the author—hopefully featuring a more active protagonist and a stronger central conflict.

In “Sleeper” by R. T. Ester, the Envoy Church was founded by a mysterious entity known as the Envoy, who is both loved and hated. To some she is a messiah and to others the grim harbinger of the news that someday Earth’s population will be wiped out and repopulated by “clones” who are AI constructs trained by their human owners. The Envoy claims to be from a future beyond the apocalypse, come back in time to close the time loop that will cause the disaster.

Dreya and Syd are two young runaways from the schools operated by the Envoy Church. Syd, who doesn’t believe clones are anything more than a complicated pattern of 1’s and 0’s, has sold her clone to the church to get enough money to pay for her brother Antwan’s first cancer treatment. Dreya clings to his clone and tries to keep a low profile, using the clone to earn money on virtual reality black sites.

When Dreya is approached by Revenge, another mysterious figure, who wants him to kill the Envoy and is willing to pay enough to fund all of Antwan’s treatments, Dreya agrees to do so.

The story is gripping, although the weight of so many futuristic terms and unexplained jargon can occasionally bog down the plot movement. Still, the twist ending, which makes the world seem to tilt on its side, is clever and strangely satisfying, and it made the story worth reading.

In “Sea of Fertility” by Bella Han, Qunqing Mu’s brother has disappeared from the virtual city of Laputa, and she is determined to find him. Thus begins an extremely long quest that takes us through a fantastically complex virtual world. She speaks to his musician friends, and eventually ends up in the virtual world’s underground, known to be the graveyard for archaic and forgotten data. There she meets her brother’s young protégé, Jonny, and the two of them continue the search.

While I appreciated the attention to detail and all the work that must have gone into this lavish virtual environment, I felt the story could have been cut down to a quarter of its length and it would have been an easier read. At times I felt the characters were just there to provide a reason to tour the city. In addition, I kept tripping over details in the environment which I didn’t find believable.

A couple of examples: even in our time, software can handle the visuals of the intersection between two non-interacting characters without inconveniencing either character or causing their forms to ‘dissolve’. And the idea of “unused” data accumulating as “digital trash” in the streets and forcing the buildings to be rendered as taller because nobody has cleaned it up…

I could go on, but I won’t. Overall, I found the story mildly entertaining but the many details of the world which didn’t ring true for me spoiled the experience. And finally, I found the ending’s message, which seemed to be “put aside your virtual reality and live in the real world” to be mildly ironic, considering the amount of time dedicated to describing said virtual reality.

“A Dream of Twin Sunsets” by Ryan Cole has created an interesting and compelling world. Giant flowers spit out choking clouds of deadly pollen that threaten to wipe out the 10% remnant of an isolated human colony. When a soldier named Corporal Journey crash lands after failing his mission to seed the flowers with poison, he is saved by Buzz, who he quickly realizes is a deserter from the colony. Journey knows he should turn the man in, but can’t bring himself to do so. Neither can he abandon his duty and stay with Buzz, who he has come to love.

Twenty years later, he comes face to face with Buzz again, and this time he has no choice but to bring Buzz in to face trial and execution.

This was my favorite of the Clarkesworld stories for this month. Journey and Buzz were sympathetic and likable, and their relationship was touching. The story had a lovely emotional crescendo moment, something I don’t often find in short stories.

In “And The Planet Loved Him” by L Chan, Guo Jing and his husband Ewan have signed up to be the scientific presence that Corporate needs in order to maintain their rights over a planet with no sentient inhabitants (or so it is assumed). The pay isn’t good, but they need the medical benefits in order to start a family.

A few weeks into their mission, a disaster occurs and Ewan kills himself to preserve resources so his husband can survive long enough to be rescued. But then it turns out that Ewan has been absorbed into an alien Consensus, and they want Guo Jing to join, too. Guo Jing doesn’t want to be absorbed, but he knows if he refuses, he’ll lose his husband forever.

A lack of solid scene setting left me floundering in the beginning of the story, and at times I had trouble following the logical progression of the story, but the science is interesting and may give readers food for thought.

In “Memories Are Only Valuable If They Can Be Lost” by Ai Jiang, the main character is trapped in a floating city. He took the job to make money which he could send to his mother and sister, and to look for his father, who disappeared after coming to the city to work. Then he is laid off from the job, and he cannot afford the prohibitively expensive train faire required to leave the city. He fears his mother and sister will never know why he stopped sending money, or what happened to him.

Then he is hired to take pictures for a wedding. Much to his surprise, the bride speaks with the accents of his birth language, and though she will tell him nothing about herself, she gives him the camera afterwards. Not long after that, he determines that he will find a way to return to his family. He disables his identification barcode to make himself invisible to the security bots, and breaks into a car. In the car’s glove box, he discovers a red envelope, and its contents cause him to abandon his plan.

The story world seems an odd mixture of new and old technology. The main character lives in a floating city, but takes pictures with a Polaroid camera. The expensive floating security bots can be foiled by the simple application of oil to a person’s barcode. It took me a while to grok the connection between his encounter with the bride (which gives the story its title) and the theme of the story, and I’m still not sure if it worked for me. But the worldbuilding was compelling, and the unexpected twist at the end made the story well worth reading.

“Heart of Thunder” by Raahem Alvi starts out with Damian Marshall a “prisoner in his own brain,” the victim of unauthorized prototype military augmentations. He is being questioned in regarding past events on the planet Ganymede, by a speaker who assures him that what happened wasn’t his fault and urges him to testify against the company that installed the augmentation.

As the story zig-zags between past and present, it gradually becomes clear that the company which hired him had installed the combat augmentation in order to use him to kill rebels who were bad for business. It isn’t clear whether he knew beforehand that he would be killing people —in the present, his brain is so fried that the narration it produces is difficult to follow. On Ganymede, the augmentation malfunctions, turning him into a killing machine who mows down a colony of civilians.

At first, I found the main character bland and rather pathetic, and the narrative style often left me wondering where he was in time. There was little description or significant plot movement, mostly a lot of inner reflection and existential commentary and conversations that seemed apropos of nothing.

But the action scenes, when they came, were vivid and visceral. In particular, the description of the interactions between Damian’s everyman brain and the insane combat tactical system which wants to see everyone around him as enemy target. Damien’s flashbacks to combat on Ganymede were riveting and horrifying, and gave me a lot more sympathy for the character.

Though its delivery was confusing, the story was a powerful commentary on the human wreckage left behind after a war. Soldiers who are used and spit out and abandoned once they are no longer useful, left to face the horror of what they have done, and struggling to understand whether they should be considered men or monsters.

In “Vwooom!” by Uchechukwu Nwaka, an augmented pilot is displaced and set adrift at the end of the war. He makes his living fighting in the Pits, only returning to his hometown upon the death of the man who had taken him in after he was orphaned. When he is delayed and misses the funeral, he reflects upon the regrets that he has had through his life. He decides to make one final sacrifice to honor the man who raised him.